[translations] Managing a translation team and translation workflow

[Gábor Hojtsy]

My "outsider" understanding (I'm not actually working in any of the
teams) is that almost every team with a decent number of translators
has an issue with moderation not going speedy enough and there is lots
of contention due to that.

Gábor

On Fri, Oct 7, 2011 at 9:43 PM, Jose A. Reyero <drupal at reyero.net> wrote:
> Hi All,
>
> Since it seems there are no common guidelines to manage a translation
> team and handle the translation workflow, I'd like to propose some to be
> discused and maybe posted as documentation. Still I think it is great
> that every translation team can have their own policy and override this
> workflow, so this would be just some recomendation.
>
> Also it would be great if we could share experiences across translation
> teams in order to improve the translation workflow. This is based on the
> organization in place for the Spanish team which is a big one (1000+
> members). I'd like to hear whether other groups have similar or
> different set ups and whether they are working well for them.
>
> The current set up:
> ==============
> 1. Administrators (all roles). Currently 10 people.
> This is granted upon request to people asking for it for some reason,
> like running a translation sprint somewhere or being in charge of some
> team doing translations. They can grant the moderator role to anyone,
> upload po's or fix any string, etc...
> Still, they are asked to generally submit po's a suggestions for
> moderation and not abusing self-moderation in general. The idea is the
> administrator role is intended to help others translate, but not to
> speed up your own translations.
>
> 2. Moderators (translation community moderator role). Difficult to count
> but there may be around 50 people.
> This is granted upon request to anyone asking for it.
> Note moderator role doesn't include self moderation.
>
> 3. Translators (only translation team member role).
> This is for every group member, membership is 'Open' for this team. They
> can submit translations but not moderating them.
>
> Current status
> =========
> - Translations come in steady, we have some of the highest % of
> translated strings
> - We have a huge bottleneck with moderation which causes some
> frustrations. Considering granting moderator role to everybody.
> - We've had some misunderstandings with auto-moderation. Considering
> taking auto-moderation from everyone (admins).
> - Missing a handbook page with this policy clearly stated (my fault),
> which may have caused some of the misunderstandings.
>
> So, I'd like to hear from other teams to learn better ideas and improve
> our workflow. Along with your experience it would be useful to have the
> approximate number of team members / administrators, etc, to decide on
> whether a given set up may be useful for small or big teams.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Jose
>
>
>
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